Canada's overall numbers are not as impressive, but they reflect the growth rotation that will see exports and business investment grab the baton from the consumer and housing sectors. Conditions already favour export growth: a weakening loonie, a surge in leading sectors, a key export market that is leading the way, and strong demand for resources.

At the IMF and World Bank Group annual meetings in Tokyo, the European economic crisis was never off the agenda and often took centre stage in panel discussions. In the streets of Athens, Madrid, and in cities of other fiscal adjusting European states, there is a real belief that this new economic reality will result in a lost generation.

The G8 Summit was oddly clarifying: With Europe riven with divisions over the euro and the sclerosis of welfare states in aging societies, the United States wrapped up in increasingly parochial domestic politics, Japan adrift and Russia backsliding into authoritarianism, Canada stood alone as a country with healthy economic prospects and a stable government.

Europe looks increasingly like it is stirring, like the awakening Brunhilda, from its torpor, and could gradually, tentatively, take up the aptitudes of intercontinental leadership of olden time. For America, it may indeed be time to learn something from Europe, but not the Europe whose emulation Barack Obama was urging four years ago.

With the release of the latest growth projections from the Bank of Canada and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it appears that Canada's two-year run at the top of the G7 group of countries could be coming to an end. Both the Bank of Canada and the IMF have lowered this year's growth predictions, paving the way for - get this - America to take over the top spot.

While last week ended on a positive note in terms of Europe's handling of its fiscal crisis, Canadians need to focus their concern on the so-called indirect effects from Europe's woes. The reality is that Europe has a very small footprint when it comes to Canadian trade abroad.

European Council President Herman Van Rompuy has just floated a proposal to subject all Union members -- not just eurozone members -- to more rigorous budget scrutiny by Union organs. The move is so contrary to the Union treaties and its scope so overreaching to the current eurozone debt crisis that it is doomed to fail.

Looks like the EU has found an alternative to German domination of everybody else. It's the French-German domination of everybody else. Attendees should not be surprised to see new details on the fly that "must" be agreed to or risk destroying the eurozone and the EU.

The pas de deux, performed for weeks by Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, is slowly easing eurozone members into becoming the United States of Europe. Frankly as political theater, it's enormously well-executed and deserves a Broadway Tony.

It's the member states paying in that lose, both by the creation of another huge bureaucracy inside the Union not all have agreed to, and in the knowledge that the Union can effectively now tax them directly, redistribute the money the way finance ministers alone see fit, and call it a bailout.

What's the newest strategy of the European Commission to remove any democratic accountability from the eurozone members? They are now aiming to consolidate all eurozone members on the IMF Executive Board into a single member, represented by... the European Commission.

There are methods which could easily be used to reform the eurozone with tighter controls. However, demoting the euro from a requirement to some sort of enhanced cooperation or its like will have its problems, largely because of the agreed ethics of such processes within the greater Union.

The race to save the euro, and how it's being conducted, will not just affect bailed out countries' control over their budgets. It will also likely harm what remaining democratic character the Union has by allowing for influence over debtor states' votes in a way the treaties anticipate and forbid.

Soon-to-be-former Greek Prime Minister Papandreou had the right instinct calling for a referendum on the austerity package. There has been a long-stranding "democratic deficit" within the European Union, with major decisions being made without the input of the Union's citizens. The latest crisis is only increasing this deficit.